On the centennial of Rod Steiger’s birth — he was born April
14, 1925 in Westhampton, New York — I am reminded of bits and pieces of
conversations we had over a period of years, at various film festivals and a
handful of movie junkets. Please don’t misunderstand: I am not claiming we were close friends, or even nodding acquaintances.
But as I look over notes and tearsheets, I see where he where, quite often, he
was quite candid and self-revelatory.
In 1991, he frankly discussed with me how, after his Oscar
win for In the Heat of the Night (1967), he battled against a deep, debilitating
depression spurred partly by other health issues. He snapped out it, or at least managed to control it, when his
doctors finally prescribed the right medication. By that time, though, he found
himself facing embarrassing questions about his career tailspin. So he did something
that, in the early 1980s, folks rarely did: He spoke out loud about the chronic
condition that had immobilized him.
“My agent and
everybody else screamed at me,” Steiger said. “But I said, ‘Listen, depression
is a disease, just like alcoholism, just like other things. And we’ve got to
get away from this thing where people think it’s insanity or something.’
“In fact, I would like to see — and I’m not joking about this — I would like to see a Depressives Anonymous, like Alcoholics Anonymous works, so a depressive person could call up and meet another group. Because the whole strength of a group like that is the sharing of pain, instead of carrying it all by yourself. And when you meet other people with the same problem, your self-pity level drops. You don't feel so sorry for yourself, or feel like God's double-crossed you.”
At the time, Steiger was in Houston was in H-Town to receive a lifetime achievement award at the WorldFest/Houston Film Festival, where he also promoted a darkly comical dramedy called Guilty as Charged, in which he authoritatively played a well-to-do vigilante who executed malefactors who had heretofore escaped justice with his very own electric chair.
“You could call it a delayed return, I guess,” Steiger said of his professional renaissance. “But I was sick for almost 10 years, and my career slowed down quite a bit. So I’m fighting to get myself re-established with a generation of executives who are about 33 years old, who came into the business while I was sick.
“I don't care if you’re a plumber or a poet or a shoemaker. If you’re doing something you love to do, and you've got a clean bed, clean food — and then, if you’re extra lucky and get somebody who has some affection for you — then you should shut your mouth. You’ve got no complaints.”
Well, maybe just a few now and then.
Over lunch at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, he copped to making what he viewed with 20/20 hindsight as “bad business decisions.” He passed on the lead role in Patton, fearing the film would glorify war. Had he played the part “half as well as George C. Scott,” he figured he might have been offered the lead in The Godfather.
And then there were the movies he did accept, but later
regretted.
“I think to be an actor,” he said, “you have to be a
little bit of a masochist. Because you’re putting your mistakes on view. Your
mistakes are made in public, they’re not only seen by people at the office.
They're seen by the entire world, eventually. When you do something that isn’t
good, that's a mistake on your part — it’s too late, that picture goes out.”
Worse, it keeps returning, thanks to what Steiger called “the recurring cancer” of television.
“So, you’re walking down the street five years later. Somebody says, ‘Hey, you’re on television tonight.’ You say, ‘Oh, The Pawnbroker?’ And they say, ‘No — The Unholy Wife.’
“See, it’s back — the cancer is back. You thought you were finished with this picture, you thought, ‘Thank God, it’s over, no one will ever see my mistakes anymore.’ But no, there it is. And you have to live with that again.”
And yet, a man with movies like The Big Knife, On the Waterfront, Doctor Zhivago, The Pawnbroker, In the Heat of the Night, No Way to Treat a Lady, Duck, You Sucker! and so many others to his credit really didn’t have much to complain about. And Rod Steiger knew it.
“You know, young people always ask me how they can begin a career, because they’d like to act. But I always tell them it’s not enough to like to be an actor. You must need to be an actor. You must have to be an actor. It will make you better as a human being to be an actor. You cannot do anything else.
“I mean, I would like to be Picasso. But I’m not.”
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